recent influences

Glass

’cause I only have eyes for you at Piet Zwart

Two small spaces with googly eyes and mirrors, very difficult to document..

‘Cause I Only Have Eyes for You

A solo show by Kirsty Buchanan
Curated by Deniz Unal

Time Opening 18-01-2012, 7.00 pm, exhibition dates 19.01 – 26.02
Location Piet Zwart Institute, Mauritsstraat 36, 3012 CJ Rotterdam



Click to view the ‘Cause I only Have Eyes For You Playlist.

Seeing and drawing and touching and feeling. Seeing and feeling and touching and drawing. Feeling and touching and drawing and seeing over and over again.

Kirsty Buchanan’s first solo show comprises of an installation of drawings made whilst blindfolded; she choses to close her vision to allow the imagined out more forcefully. Through this action every drawing is a surprise, a moment of discovery yet each drawing has its own repetitive language encoded within it. As if the walls of her imagination want her to know the same thing over and over again. Here desire, fantasy, imagination ask no questions-they want just to see the depictions of abstract, naughty, awkward pleasures and the hands mercifully deliver.

Working in close collaboration with the curator, Buchanan’s drawings are introduced to a different mode of display in this show, by the introduction of objects that have specifically arisen from her work and the acknowledgement of the specificity of location.

http://pzwart.wdka.nl/fine-art/2012/01/13/cause-i-only-have-eyes-for-you/

http://telephoneboothproject.com/

The dying game

I kept dreaming about the end of the world

Rotterdam

I spent a month at Kaus Australis in Rotterdam. Amongst millions of other things, here are a few things that I was looking at…..

Reclining nudes

www.theartsection.com

Different artists who draw, writing about each other. Curated by Andrew Hewish.

Kirsty Buchanan by Paul Kindersley

Delicate Fucking

Faint outlines crossing over each other, intertwining blue wobbly lines, an eye, a nipple, labia, penis, lips, nose?. From Buchanans drawings we can start to piece together the sexual act from its isolated ingredients. The line leading us from one to another, on its way making new titillating connections, and drawing us into its world. The erratic lines start to create a new anatomy of some recognisable and other new bodily parts. We become the excited voyeur, our eye led from lip to knee to breast, creating a unique sexual configuration. The eye, the biro, the viewer, the artist, all merge, and together, like a tentative finger we slowly caress and explore what we see before us.

The continuous line dribbles from the biro as it makes love to the paper through the drawing process. The biro becomes an extension of the sexual organ, ejaculating onto the clean white paper. The hand as the memory of the act works in unison with the biro to create the image. The drawings become a mixture of the remembered sexual encounter and evidence of a new sexual creation. Each subtle movement, nook, and twist of the line becoming a new erogenous zone, in its creation, and also in its viewing. 

The orgasmic biro spill traces its shuddering climax across the page. Gasping white spaces where the line stops, a sharp intake of breath before the frenzied drawing starts again. Line enters line, rolls around, turns back and attacks itself.  The drawing so caught up in the act that all regard for its own boundaries, edges and reality is lost. What started as sex itself, became stored in the memory, and then expelled onto the page, a messy yet enchanting version of the original enchanting yet messy act. The sprawling shapes trying not only to capture the constant movement, thrusts and convolutions, but the artists involvement in its creation too. As we encounter the work, what at first seems a delicate and insubstantial sketch quickly starts to quicken the pulse as we stitch together its intentions with our own memories. 

Like the heroine in The Story of O, Buchanan is blindfolded to draw and is lead into a world of sexual stimulation, adventures and discovery. Down corridors in the castle of her imagination, revisiting partners, pornography and encounters until the start to merge as one, situations spanning the real and the imagined. Through the absence of the visual she feels out her drawings, at once awkward and enjoyable, like sex itself.

Paul Kindersley is a film obsessed artist/stalker/curator currently living and working in London.